Toure drops 30, Kamiakin holds off LC to go to 5-0

Despite playing much of the second half with four fouls, Oumou Toure scored 30 points on Saturday to lead the host Kamiakin High School girls basketball team to a 70-54 win over Lewis and Clark in nonleague action.

The Tigers (2-4), who trailed by as many as 24 points, proved their prowess as a second-half team on Friday when they came back from a big third-quarter deficit to beat Richland 61-56 on Friday. They had hoped to pull off an even bigger shocker with Toure in foul trouble, but came up just short.

“Oumou picked up her fourth foul, and then we kind of lost our composure a little bit,” Kamiakin coach Lane Schumacher said. “I’m glad we were able to get it back and start competing again, finish the game off, but that was a bad 5-minute stretch of basketball.”

When LC had success, it beat Kamiakin at its own game. The Tigers played fast in transition, forced turnovers, and knocked down a few 3s, four of them by Kaylee Bishop — accounting for all her scoring.

“They beat us back on transition, and usually we’re the team that’s scoring in transition,” Schumacher said. “They turned it on us, and did what we like to do for that 5-minute stretch.”

But Kamiakin (5-0) is among the best at what it does for a reason. Alexa Hazel chipped in 20 points with four 3-pointers and helped pace the Braves’ up-tempo attack on both sides of the ball.

“We’re looking to score a high amount of points and force a lot of turnovers,” Schumacher said. “We’ve been doing that for years, it’s not a new philosophy for us, so hopefully we’ll just keep getting better at it.”

The Tigers showed their toughness by using a 9-2 run to close the first quarter and pull within a possession of the Braves at 14-12. But that’s as close as they would get, as Kamiakin — which never trailed — went on a 16-2 run in the middle of the second quarter (keyed by three Hazel 3-pointers) to pull away and eventually lead 37-20 at the intermission.

Kamiakin got into trouble in the third quarter when Toure picked up her third and fourth fouls, forcing her to come off for about 5 minutes of game time. LC used that as a rallying point, finishing the period on a 20-4 run — paced by seven points from Claire Mann off the bench — to trail 48-40 with a quarter to go.

But Schumacher rolled the dice, and let Toure play the entirety of the final period with four fouls, which allowed Kamiakin to stop the bleeding.

“That’s what these preseason games are for,” Schumacher said. “You want to win, but you want to correct some things and be able to go look at film on Monday and break it down.”

Jacinta Buckley scored a game-high 13 points for LC and Dominique Arquette matched Bishop with 12.

UP NEXT

Lewis and Clark: Hosts Mead in a Greater Spokane League game at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Kamiakin: Continues nonleague play with a tough road matchup against Moses Lake at 7 p.m. Tuesday.

This story was originally published December 9, 2017 at 8:07 PM with the headline "Toure drops 30, Kamiakin holds off LC to go to 5-0."